Every year, Backblaze, the online backup service I use, publishes its failure rate for the hard drives it uses in its backup servers. The latest report is up and this is useful data. In 2020, they added nearly 40,000 drives and monitored 162,530 drives. With those sorts of numbers, you can get an idea for what hard drive manufacturers are cutting the mustard.

My big take away is that drives are getting better. The overall failure rate is down and big winners were Seagate and HGST. If you need to buy any spinning drives, I’d recommend checking this out.